neon cuckoo bee

piggsy

A neon cuckoo bee. These target the blue banded bees, they lay their eggs in the blue banded nests before they're completed, and the cuckoo hatches earlier and eats the stored food before the blue banded bee larvae can get to it. Have to get up reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallly early in the morning to get these guys - ran into them twice at 4am and couldn't get 'em, had to come back for a 3rd go in complete darkness and cooler weather.

E-P5 / Olympus 60mm 2.8 / Cross polarised and ordinary flash












Here's a gif of their pre-takeoff cleaning ritual.

Lord Vetinari

Wonderful shots of a great looking bee.
Brian v.

e6filmuser

Lovely images.

The "cross-polarised" with ordinary flash is intriguing. The standard arrangement is with the filters on the front of the lens and ring flash. Other arrangements tend to be cumbersome.

Harold

piggsy

Thanks!

It works pretty good with just a linear polariser over the flash head and a circular polariser on the lens. It can be a pain in the arse sometimes (mainly - light loss can be pretty extreme, and you can have a hard time getting rid of harsh black shadows depending on the surrounds of the subject, both of which are made much worse if you only have one flash head). I go back and forth between using both the i40 and fl600r with the linear polariser film or just the i40 with the film and the 600r very flatly diffused. I made a thread on it a while ago on the mu-43 site:

https://www.mu-43.com/threads/anyone-using-cross-polarised-flash-for-macrophotography-on-m43.81496/page-2

I have a whole bunch (0000s) of butterfly images from the recent mega butterfly migration (100s of thousands of caper white butterflies came through) I'm still processing and butterfly and moth wings can sometimes react neatly with it, since they're basically semi gloss scales. I think this neon bee would also have been a real pain to shoot without it, you can see on the side on shot (#4) how glossy the black parts are, and how incredibly strongly reflective the blue parts are. Certainly glad I got this set up before I ran into them

Cygnus Studios

I learn something new every time I visit the macro section. What a cool looking bee.

GOLDENORFE

Stunning looking Wasp , well done for getting the shots